Book Review: INSURRECTO by Gina Apostol

Insurrecto by Gina Apostol

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Maybe it is enough to know it, the past. Maybe change lies outside the story, in the countries we are still making up. I mean, can the exchange of our stories be a way of redemption?"

FINALLY got around to reading "Insurrecto," the novel with BenCab's "Woman with Fan" on the cover that everyone's been talking about!

It does, indeed, tell a story worth re-telling, and despite the return of the Balangiga bells only this past December, we still need to tell the story of the titular character, Casiana Nacionales. Samar's Gabriela Silang, the true-to-life heroine who was one of the leaders of the uprising against American conquerors.

It is NOT an easy read. And it is the difficulty of the prose that made me subtract a star. I'm someone who believes the best stories are the ones told simply. Although whether this is the author's unique voice or a style especially chosen to tell this particularly complex narrative is a mystery to me, as it is my first Apostol novel. It won't be the last.

What fascinates me the most about the book is Casiana Nacionales, whom I wouldn't have heard of had it not been for this novel. Her name was not written in history books, she was discovered only through the oral histories!! This fact highlights the importance of story-telling, in all its forms.

I won't go into the whole literariness of the novel, but suffice it to say that if you should undertake reading this, you better have access to a dictionary. Ahaha.

I do have so much awe for the sheer skill, the craftsmanship it took, to weave together three? four? different timelines, to skillfully portray the interweaving of past and present, to highlight the importance of keeping history and memory alive in today's age of fake news and historical revisionism, throwing in quotes from Shakespeare and Walter Scott and Chekhov along the way.

The passage that struck me the most was this:

"The pictures have no captions. Women cradling their naked babies at their breasts... A dead child sprawled in the middle of a road. A naked girl running toward the viewer in a field, her arms outstretched, as if waving. A beheaded, naked body splayed against a bamboo fence. A child's arms spread out on the ground, in the shape of a cross. A woman holding the body of her dead husband, in the pose of the Pieta."

Whether we are in Trang Bang in 1972, or Balangiga in 1901, or modern-day Manila, Apostol's message of keeping history alive reverberates urgently.



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